Grow Slow

As for me, my internal pace is slow. Mine is the intrinsic slowness of the tree that embraces its growth and its blooming. Yes, I have a bit of its admirable patience. I had to train myself in it from the moment I understood the secret slowness that engenders and distills any work of art. But if I know its temporal measure, I know nothing of its immobility. Oh, the joys of travel!

---Ranier Maria Rilke
The Book of Hours II, 34

Charged

How all things are in migration! How they seek refuge in us. How each of them desires to be relieved of externality and to live again in the Beyond which we enclose and deepen within ourselves. We are convents of lived things, dreamed things, impossible things; all that is in awe of this century saves itself within us and there, on its knees, pays its debt to eternity.

Little cemetaries that we are, adorned with the flowers of our futile gestures, containing so many corpses that demand that we testify to their souls. All prickly with crosses, all covered with inscriptions, all spaded up and shaken by countless daily burials, we are charged with the transmutation, the resurrection, the transfiguration of all things. For how can we save what is visible if not by using the language of the absence, of the invisible?

And how to speak this language that remains mute unless we sing it with abandon and without any insistence on being understood.

Ranier Maria Rilke
Letter to Sophy Giauque
November 26, 1925

She Goes Away From Me

 

She goes away from me.
We call it traveling.
We say it makes us grow to be apart.
Something is dull around my heart.
She calls me every night.
Though she left in the light,
in the morning I am formal
I make the day seem normal.

Women want to speak, to trust
with knowledge every loss,
to follow thread from the needle's eye
straight to the lucid sky.
Andrea speaks of sexual intelligence.
One to another we hold evidence.
Sewn in the corners of our samplers
we tell the underside of what appears.
Thus we grow together like grass,
wind singing and tuned, we are a mass.

Karin likens you and me to family,
our leaving like the failing of a village
without a name, and not yet mapped.
Or like a young death; infant wrapped
into the ground. What is this for,
this little life, nothing more
than brief breathing? And yet, it's not from pity
that mothers christen for eternity.
Women brought communion
to every effort in the West.
Men spoke of softening but this was less
than we intended. What we mean by root
is metaphor and real, buried essence, truth.
Somewhere in the circle of each mind
is every detail, bliss, suffering, kind.

She goes away from me
but someone in her does not leave.
And I am pulled out there.
This is called pain, called missing, loss.
But keeping this, one can go anywhere.
All I've lost is what I have not grieved.

---Susan Griffin--from Unremembered Country

Replenishing Flame

            The other day, before going to yoga I was tempted to bail because of fear of judgement from my teacher. I hadn’t been to the studio in a few weeks and for some reason I felt shame for that.

            Once I got to my mat, I realized how my fear of my teacher and the situation was merely a projection, my absence representing my internal wrestle with fire—in the practice and in life. This got me thinking about how so much fear in my life is merely a projection of what I fear in myself. These projections are like sand in the wind, leaving my essence no ground to root itself into.

            The other morning, I took a walk in the forest with my sister. We talked of yin and yang—how both of us emphasize the masculine, firey yang and drain ourselves to the point of break down. It is a swinging pendulum upon which yin is siphoned from the depths of our souls through mere exhaustion. Like the sandbar exposing precious shells upon being beaten by a violent surf.

Sometime it takes indulging in heat to realize we don’t need so much of it. Creation isn’t the issue—and what is created is born out of fire. The issue is refractory silence—the replenishment of that flame. The deeper I get into my creation the more I recognize the true necessity of non-doing. Only in this introspective, negative space can I address the fears that hold me back from experiencing and loving fully.